Smart move, Remo Rubble, he told himself. Do just the right thing to attract a bunch of sharks. Over his self-recrimination came a wave of alarm as he realized that the rumble of the boats was now just a tiny vibration in the water as the distance increased. Dammit!
The tiger shark was hurt but not slowed. It veered in a tight circle and came back fast. It was in pain and it was angry-but not as angry as the Reigning Master of Sinanju.
"I've had enough!" he shouted. It wasn't the most intelligent behavior for a Master of Sinanju who was twenty feet below the surface with a big carnivore to contend with, but the shout would have shattered a man's eardrums above water. The tiger shark's head snapped as if it had been sucker-punched, and it fled from Remo Williams.
Remo knew a good thing when he saw it. He made his way to the surface, gulped air and descended as the tiger shark came back at him. This time Remo had full lungs and he let the shark get close enough to touch, then he exploded "Back off!"
Your average human being couldn't have even come close to vocalizing so loud and so powerfully, and the wall of sound collided with the shark like a depth charge. It jerked away, stiffened momentarily and hung in the water. It made no motion for seconds, and its twelve-foot-long body began to descend in a lifeless twisting motion. Then it flicked its tail, righted itself and moved weakly away.
Remo spotted another dorsal closing in when he reached the surface. Time to get the hell out of there. He began to knife through the water, chasing the boats, but keeping an eye out just in case. The sharks might come after him, but their burst of speed could not be sustained like Remo could sustain his speed. Remo could swim for hours without resting, and swim fast, but not fast enough to catch up to the boats. The Melody was immensely overpowered for a pleasure yacht, and for once her engines were actually being used beyond a fraction of their capacity. The trawler was clearly outfitted with a power plant that was faster than your typical fishing vessel might need.
That maniac pirate captain, Teach, had obviously been spooked by his run-in with the DEA and the possibility that the Melody was a sting operation. He was getting out of the vicinity fast.
Too fast for Remo.
Well, shit.
The boats shrank to specks that appeared only occasionally over the tops of the waves, and when they were almost gone from his sight they veered in opposite directions. Cap'n Teach was going to confuse any pursuit that might be coming.
Remo kept swimming in the direction the boats had headed originally. He would keep going that way until he hit land. Any land. He wondered how long he would actually last.
Hell, he was warm enough. He could rest when he needed to. He could go for days if necessary. But days might be too long for Stacy Armitage. By this time tomorrow, Remo was grimly aware, she would still be alive, but in all likelihood she would have been subjugated to the entertainment of the pirates.
He had seen what that did to Stacy's sister-in-law. He didn't want it to happen to her, too. He kept swimming.
Then he saw a new speck.
It was a sailboat, gliding toward him, still something like half a mile away. If it held to its present course, he thought that it would pass within a hundred yards or so of his position.
Remo swam to meet it.
Chapter 12
Despite the brave front she had managed to put on for her abductors, Stacy Armitage was terrified. Her brother's death and the brutal torment suffered by his widow prior to her escape were still too fresh in Stacy's mind for her to cling to any illusions of security. Then the more recent whirlwind events. Just hours ago she awoke on a small boat with a pair of DEA men, put there by that asshole Remo Rubble. They were taking her to safety, they said.
That was twenty minutes before the pirates stopped them, shot them, slipped their bodies in the Caribbean, then sank their boat.
She was even more shocked when she was pulled out of her cell on the pirate trawler to find herself looking at the Melody. She saw Pablo, with a gun held on that asshole Remo and the old chauvinist Chiun.
She watched Remo jump to his death.
Chiun was put on the trawler with her, along with the buccaneer named Teach, and half a dozen of his crewmen. The remainder had been left to pilot the Melody, which ran a hundred yards or so behind the pirate craft. The skull-and-crossbones flag no longer flew above the trawler, which for all intents and purposes appeared to be a normal, run-down fishing boat once more-except that it went like a bat out of hell. The hull vibrated, and she could feel the engines straining to maintain the pace.
Stacy and Chiun were housed belowdecks, out of sight and under guard. They didn't have a pirate with them in the tiny cabin they had been assigned-more like a storage closet, Stacy thought, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the squalid room-but Teach had left a man outside the door, and others passed by, talking to him, at sporadic intervals.
She wondered how much time had passed since they were taken prisoner and Remo had gone overboard, but glancing at her wrist reminded Stacy that the pirates had already relieved her of her watch. It was a birthday gift, from Cartier, and while the watch itself was trivial, all things considered, staring at her bare wrist brought fresh tears to Stacy's eyes. She felt so helpless, and it galled her to have come this far, only to have her quest end in failure.
"Not to worry," said Chiun. It was the first time he had spoken since they came aboard the trawler, and his words took Stacy by surprise. "We have them now."
"Excuse me?"
Chiun edged closer so that he could speak without the guard outside their cell hearing his words. "These pirates have big trouble," he declared.
"Uh-huh. Just let me get this straight," she said. "We're trapped in here, but they're in trouble?"
"One man's trap may be another's opportunity," said Chiun.
"Confucius?"
The old Korean scowled. "Chiun!" he answered.
"Sorry."
"I could stop these vermin now, of course," Chiun went on, "but that is not the plan."
"The plan?"
"We must discover where they live and breed," said Chiun. "When Remo joins us, we shall know the time is right."
"Remo? But he ...I mean ...he's gone!"
"Dawdling, probably," Chiun corrected her. "There were sharks in the water when he jumped."
"What?" she gasped, terrified.
"He doubtless deemed it more important to stop to eat one of them before he joined us," Chiun sniffed. "The stink will make you less attracted to him."
Stacy already felt like Alice on the wrong side of the looking glass, but now she was convinced that she had lost her mind. She had heard so many astonishing and insulting statements at one time she didn't know how to sort it all out.
Chiun, she decided, had retreated into fantasy. Poor old man.
"Chiun," she said gently, "Remo is not coming. Remo is dead."
"Oh, no. Although he may try to use that as an excuse for his tardiness-I would not put it past him." Chiun spoke without blinking, his timeless face impassive.
She nodded solemnly. Clearly, the faithful old man had gone into some sort of state of extreme denial. That wasn't going to help them.
"But what if he is dead?" she pressed, but gently.
"Then I will kill them all myself." Chiun shrugged.
Stacy tried to imagine the frail old man in combat, but she couldn't manage it. With Remo, having watched him kill four men, it was a different matter. In Chiun's case, though, it was impossible to picture him engaged in any exercise more strenuous than watching television or preparing rice and fish.
"You let the pirates think that you're Chinese," she said.
Chiun's lips twitched. A grimace or a smile, Stacy could not have said exactly which it was. "Their first mistake," he said.